Inside Keith Gibbs’ office hangs an imprint of a sicklefin redhorse, a sucker fish that the Western Carolina University assistant professor in the Department of Geosciences and Natural Resources takes great interest in. 

The Conservation Fund announced that a critical property in the Great Balsam Mountains is protected as forest and natural land.

By now, the story of Hurricane Helene is a tragically familiar one: the endless rain, the swollen rivers, the angry water indiscriminately destroying lives and homes. The storm killed more than 230 people across five states, including 104 confirmed dead in North Carolina and 18 in Tennessee. 

Alexandra Lewis, a USDA Forester in the Nantahala Ranger District will offer a presentation to shed light on valuation of forests. The presentation will touch on how a forest is valued relative to quality of life and flora sustainability. 

Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy (SAHC) is celebrating 50 years of conserving clean water, plant and wildlife habitat, farmland and scenic beauty in the mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee.

To the Editor:

Last week, we were informed that one of our Macon County commissioners is planning to eliminate the floodplain (development) ordinance. My small eco-tours business will be negatively impacted by this. 

It’s  tough out there for anyone hoping to gain entry into the housing market. 

As Christmas 1900 approached, ornithologist Frank Chapman hatched an idea. 

A collection of 47,000 plants and animals currently tucked away in various rooms of Western Carolina University’s Stillwell building will soon have a new home thanks to a $517,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. 

More than 100 people filled the room at Asheville’s Crowne Plaza Hotel earlier this month, but they weren’t there for the pretzels. This 16th meeting in the forest management plan revision process for the Pisgah and Nantahala national forests drew people from across Western North Carolina representing a spectrum of interests. Those interests all converged on one topic — wildlife. 

“The overall theme that I feel like from the wildlife habitat perspective is to manage this forest for diversity,” Sheryl Bryan, a U.S. Forest Service wildlife biologist, told the crowd. 

More than 300 of the 1,000-plus comments the Forest Service has received so far about its management plan pertained to wildlife, and of those, Bryan said, “we did by far receive the most comments concerning the amount of early successional habitat and the mix of age classes associated with that. So the elephant’s out there and we’re going to talk about that.”